Shakespeare in Secret

I'm approaching my final year at University, and as an English student I'm about to embark on the inevitable; Shakespeare. So far this summer I've managed to read 28, which leaves only ten to go, so the finish line is very much in sight. Hurrah! Obviously Shakey's been dead for centuries, and yet his plays have somehow transcended the constraints of time with stories that even now are frequently reproduced for the screen. Perhaps the most significant upcoming release is King Lear, featuring Anthony Hopkins as the tragic title-character with Keira Knightley, Gwyneth Paltrow and Naomi Watts as his three daughters. It's a great play and could make a great film, so I'm already really excited despite the fact that we're looking at a 2010 release. There's been no shortage of Shakespeare in cinemas in the last decade, and those with the biggest box office hauls have been those which relocate the action to modern-day America and reimagine the characters as high-schoolers. So what impact does this have on the original text, and why are filmmakers targeting an audience which is presumably the most anti-Shakespeare demographic on earth?

First of all, age isn't always an issue. Baz Luhrmann's excellent Romeo and Juliet was completely accurate; the star cross'd lovers were always meant to be teenagers. But what about Get Over It, the truly abysmal adaptation of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream', or She's the Man, the surprisingly pleasant though occasionally moronic version of 'Twelfth Night'? Why the easy option of a high school comedy when you've already got comedic gold already written and royalty free? As far as I can see, the relocation of these plays to include sixteen to eighteen year olds is an effort on someone's part to pretend as far as possible that the film is about as far away from the bald guy we studied at school as humanly possible. Sure, there's the odd undeniable reference (Illyria in She's The Man, Stratford being Kat and Bianca's surname in Ten Things I Hate About You) but other than that any difficult aspects of the play are scrapped for teenagers' viewing pleasure. In 'Twelfth Night', Violet thinks that her brother has died in a shipwreck and, stranded in a foreign land, pretends to be a boy to ensure her security. In She's The Man, Violet is merely left a note by her brother stating that he has popped over to London for a couple of weeks, and she disguises herself as him in order to be able to play soccer. It is as if whoever wrote the script needed to flip the gender roles even more than Shakespeare did and thought 'I know, we'll make her like sports!' Similarly, the final message of 'The Taming of the Shrew' spoken by Katherine herself, that women should always obey men, is scrapped in favour of the concept that men will always be forgiven for being paid to date a woman if they buy her a guitar. The original message is of course too dated for modern day life, but then why bother making the film? It's a great teen film, but there's a strange friction between the original play and the new film which renders it a poor adaptation. So why push Shakespeare into the shadows? Are teenagers really so shallow that they would be less likely to see Get Over It if the trailers mention any trace of him? Maybe they are, in which case they're likely to miss out on King Lear unless some hasty re-writes make Lear a rich businessman offering his three major credit cards to his three high-school daughters before the two eldest try and bankrupt him while the youngest flees to a boarding school in France. If they manage to credibly get the eye-gouging scene in, I'll be first in the queue.

Why Keira's In For A Challenge

There are few Hollywood starlets that I rate more highly than Keira Knightley, and of all late actresses I am fairly unoriginal in my fondness for Audrey Hepburn, so the news that Knightley has signed up to fill Hepburn’s shoes in a planned remake of My Fair Lady is, for me, great news. Her vocals in the recent release The Edge of Love suggest that she won’t require the dubbing that Hepburn did, and her last couple of performances have truly proven that she has the acting chops to manage the role. The problem seems to be, however, whether or not any individual can ever truly succeed in a performance that has been done to perfection already. Jude Law, for example, failed spectacularly to capture the cheeky charm of Michael Caine’s Alfie, while Heath Ledger had to almost completely reinvent the Joker in order to escape the shadow of Jack Nicholson. Ledger’s is one of the few success stories in an encyclopaedia of failures, and there are perhaps no actors whose body of work has been imitated to such vast and undoubtable failure as Hepburn. I’m staying hopeful that Knightley will do the part justice, but given the past efforts it’s not looking good. Let’s review shall we?

Julia Ormond in Sabrina
As remakes go this isn’t half bad, but Ormond lets herself become upstaged by hog Harrison Ford, something that Audrey Hepburn would never have done. As appearances go, it’s a great match, but the performance is a little lacklustre and isn’t a patch on the original.

Thandie Newton in The Truth About Charlie
An adaptation of one of my favourite Hepburn films Charade, this is just awful. Thandie Newton is certainly as beautiful as the woman who played Reggie Lampert first time around, but her acting is hammy and over the top and the chemistry between Hepburn and Cary Grant which made Charade so wonderful is practically non-existent with Thandie and Mark Wahlberg (who, incidentally, should stop ruining remakes with his presence).

Mandy Moore in Chasing Liberty
This isn’t a remake in the strictest sense, but is generally perceived as a modern re-imagining of Roman Holiday, set in a montage of European cities and featuring a very familiar Vespa ride. Mandy Moore is her usual perky self in a fairly pleasant film, but never truly convinces that she’s not just playing herself again.

Jennifer Love Hewitt in The Audrey Hepburn Story
Again, not a remake, but a biopic. There are no words to describe how awful Love Hewitt is in this, so I shan’t bother finding any.


Good Luck Keira. With the reputation that precedes you, something tells me you’re going to need it.

Spot the Difference

It has recently been revealed that Tim Burton will soon start work on his adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, with casting beginning with Australian actress Mia Wasikowska and the possibility of Johnny Depp (right, as Willy Wonka) appearing as the Mad Hatter. Past attempts to transfer Lewis Carroll’s classic novel to film have been wildly unsatisfying (I’m thinking specifically of Disney’s animation and the 1999 TV movie) but I’m sure that Burton has the ability to bring out the true hallucinogenic quality of Wonderland. On discovering the news of this film though, my first thought had nothing to do with casting, or Burton, or even past adaptations. Instead, I instantly remembered reading about another film currently stuck in pre-production; Alice, based on the computer game where Carroll’s protagonist returns to the strange world to find it a darker place than she remembers. It looks as if the film may never get made and yet IMDb still slates it for a 2009 release. So does the world want two Alice in Wonderland films in the space of a year? How does the first to be released effect the second? Can both find an audience and financial success, or is one doomed to fail?

Let’s look at the track record. Hollywood is rarely original so the release of two similar films in quick succession is hardly a new issue, just look at Antz and A Bug’s Life. If I stopped the average person in the street, however, and asked them if they’d seen the 1991 film about Robin Hood, they would surely assume that I was enquiring about Prince of Thieves starring Kevin Costner (which I love by the way). Very few, if any, would even acknowledge the existence of the film’s rival Robin Hood, which starred Uma Thurman as Marian (below left, with Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio in Prince of Thieves right) and had a video release in the UK after being made for TV in the US. The film is no worse than the more famous version, and is at the very least more historically accurate than Costner’s offering (the Celts several centuries out of date really got me). So why did one get all the attention? Perhaps it has something to do with the actors involved; Kevin Costner, Christian Slater, Alan Rickman and Morgan Freeman were all big names in the early nineties, while Thurman was a new face on the Hollywood radar after Dangerous Liaisons. If the big names always win, however, then what about Infamous? This 2006 film followed Truman Capote’s relationship with the men who inspired In Cold Blood, practically the same story as 2005’s hugely successful Capote. Infamous, however, had a host of Hollywood stars including Sandra Bullock, Gwyneth Paltrow, Daniel Craig, Sigourney Weaver and Isabella Rossellini, surely trumping its competitor. Nor is the film considered particularly inferior to the other, while many consider Toby Jones’s performance superior to the one which won Phillip Seymour Hoffman an Oscar. In this case then, the answer to the question of why one succeeds while the other fades into obscurity is simple; Capote got there first.

If the success of a film with a direct subject rival can be hampered by an inferior all-star cast or a secondary release, then the makers of Dylan must be bracing themselves for a car crash. After this summer’s The Edge of Love, a film about Welsh poet Dylan Thomas’s relationship with his wife and ex (played by starlets Sienna Miller and Keira Knightley), comes the delayed Caitlin (starring Rosamund Pike as the eponymous wife) and then Dylan starring, um, Neil Morrissey and Matthew Kelly in supporting roles. If they submit to the trend which has destroyed the success of Robin Hood and Infamous, then the third Dylan Thomas film in one year may not be third time lucky. We can only hope that Tim Burton can break the curse.

Does Race Have A Place in Fantasy?

Today I finally managed to see Prince Caspian a couple of weeks after its release and, generally speaking, I was impressed. It shows an improvement from The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and considering how much I enjoyed that film this was no mean feat. It wasn't perfect of course; I particularly disliked the Caspian/Susan romantic subplot, and still maintain that William Moseley's Peter is the weak link of the Pevensie children (Georgie Henley was just amazing yet again). The one thing that really grated, however, was the introduction of a clan of black centaurs; not centaurs that just had darker skin, but ones with dreadlocks and slightly Caribbean accents. I wasn't sure why this annoyed me as I am in no way racist and think that many shows or films really should attempt to present non-white characters, if only for realism's sake than anything else. My issue, then, is when the desire for equality transfers from films which ape reality (SATC:The Movie's inclusion of Carrie's new black assistant, for example) to ones based firmly in fantasy, worlds where the source material makes no such distinction.

Don't get me wrong, I completely understand how race can be used as a device to help audiences. Making the Telmarines appear Mediterranean, for example, means that younger viewers know which side is which. And yet there is surely a risk that children in particular may learn to associate men of such appearance with menace or malcontent; why else would Disney have preserved Jafar's Arabic accent whilst making Aladdin's accent decidedly American? The inclusion of the black centaurs thus seems a clumsy attempt on the film maker's part to break a pattern established in the fantasy films that have come before Prince Caspian.

A couple of examples strike me as particularly relevant for consideration. The Lord of the Rings trilogy uses race in a way that I neglected to notice until my third or fourth viewing. In the final film, for instance, the men riding the great oliphants to battle on the Pelennor fields are clearly dark-skinned, as are the troops marching to the Black Gate in The Two Towers. The use of dark and light is of course a common device; the big black orcs represent evil, it's not rocket science. Race, however, is obviously different to colour, so using black actors as a natural opposition to good, white characters is a transparent and lazy means to an end. Similarly, the late Wi Kuki Kaa, an actor from New Zealand with almost Aboriginal looks, was reportedly cast as the leader of the Wild Men who help the Rohirrim in the third novel. This part of the narrative didn't make it past the pre-production stages, but the point remains; the colour of a man's skin seems to have been at least in part the reason behind his casting. Surely there's something wrong with that. At least the trilogy displays some level of consistency though, matching races with the regions from whence they came. The Narnia films, however, do no such thing. Dwarves in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe seem to be East-Asian, especially those seen at the battle with long, plaited beards and the stereotypically generic Chinese/Japanese complexion. By Prince Caspian, the dwarves are now benevolent, if slightly cynical, creatures who have lost their non-Caucasian appearance. The message, one that is I'm sure not meant by those behind the films, is that good dwarves are white while bad ones are not.

I don't claim to know much about the study of race, but it doesn't take a degree in Edward Said studies to see what is being done in these films. Racial integration has no place in the fantasy genre, and while I'm sure the inclusion of dread locked centaurs seemed like a great idea at the time, it is an ineffective and unnecessary addition to what is shaping up to be an excellent franchise.

5 Reasons Why I Cannot Wait For 'The Hobbit'!

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the Lord of the Rings was just amazing, perhaps three of the best films ever made and, due to unecessary additions to the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises, it may just be the best trilogy in the history of film. The combination of critical acclaim and box office takings led to the assumption by many that it was only a matter of time before The Hobbit was greenlit, and luckily for us their assumption is spot-on. The Hobbit is on the way, with a much publicised change of director in the wonderful Guillermo del Toro. In many ways, this prequel to Tolkien's more famous series lends itself to film far more than The Lord of the Rings, with less uneventful trekking, more humour and pockets of action which will make a more fun and child-friendly movie. The film is only in the very early stages, and we'll be waiting at least three years to see it, but since when did that stop people like me talking about it? I can't wait, and here are five reasons why;

Elf Cameos! - In the book, Bilbo, Gandalf and the dwarves pass through Rivendell and Mirkwood, so there's definite potential for brief glimpses at Elrond, Legolas, Arwen and, by association, Aragorn! Including them in the entirety of the narrative would be stupid, but wouldn't it be great to get a quick glimpse of good old Legolas in attendance at the elves' forest feast? Won't you make it happen Guillermo? Pretty please?


The Siege of Lake-town - One of the more climactic events in the novel, when Smaug the dragon wreaks vengeance for Bilbo's theft by laying waste the nearby town, could make an excellent spectacle. I'm imagining Smaug doing Nazgul-style nose-dives through the air, with Bard the Bowman a half Aragorn, half John McClane figure; a lone hero protecting those who pay him no attention. Ooooh it's giving me goosebumps!

Beorn - Bilbo and his travel companions receive help and shelter from a mysterious and imposing forest-dwelling man who, it later turns out, also has the ability to transform into a giant black bear; half cuddly toy, half killing machine. Potentially the coolest thing in the whole book.

The Battle of the Five Armies - LOTR had some spectacular battle scenes, but we've never seen the damage that a whole lot of dwarves can do, while the warg combat in The Two Towers could be given a much greater scope here. And what's a battle of Middle Earth without eagles!?

The Chance to See How it All Began! - Bilbo. Gollum. Riddles in the Dark. 'Nuff said.



If The Hobbit follows its predecessor to a close-to-Christmas release, then we only have, what, forty months to go? It'll be done before we know it! Meanwhile, let the speculation begin!

The Jetsons Movie!

Earlier today I was sitting at my desk at my work experience placement, sneaking a sly internet session in between tasks, when a blog caught my eye and made one of my childhood dreams come true. Yes indeed, a Jetsons movie is on the way! Yes indeed, I am the lamest individual on the planet.

I really can't explain why this is such great news, but I will say that the Jetsons kicked the Flinstones' dirty prehistoric arses, and yet it is the moronic duo Fred and Barney which got the screen treatment a whole fourteen years ago. Like this 1994 film, the Jetsons will be live-action rather than animation, so I'm imagining Speed Racer-esque aesthetics and a comedic edge. But who on earth, I hear you scream, can fill those futuristic shoes of theirs? Here's my perfect cast;

George Jetson - Word on the street is that Steve Martin is being lined up for the part, which would be a decent match if it weren't for the fact that I HATE STEVE MARTIN (unless he's in The Three Amigos- GENIUS!). Anyway, I'm gunning for William H. Macy. He can act, he can do humour, and he's bored of indie films. All he needs is a ginger dye-job and he's perfect!

Jane Jetson - She's a cute red-head with smarts and sass. Julianne Moore. No arguments. She would be so much fun and hasn't had a chance to prove her talent for the light-hearted in a good few years. To be honest, I'd cast her in any film ever made.


Judy Jetson - It's a difficult one, as they have to make the most shallow member of the family worth watching whilst making the white hair-do look normal, without being a 2D imitation of Legally Blonde's Elle Woods or Cher of Clueless. I'm tempted to say Scarlett Johansson but she may be too old. You know what, who cares? This is my dream cast. We'll have Scarlett.


Elroy Jetson - He's a genius pre-schooler, so would have to be a baby voiced by an adult. Resisting the temptation to let Seth Macfarlane do his Stewie Griffin voice (so tempting!), I'll go with Zach Braff, simply for his charm as the voice of Chicken Little, and also because he's leaving Scrubs and I want to keep him around.


Rosie - Rosie is the dedicated, smart-talking house robot. After seeing the rather awful Bringing Down the House I would say that Queen Latifah would be perfection in this, with a recognisable voice and dollops of attitude. For the record, I'm not being racist by making the black actress voice the help, I just think she'd be ideal! No one combines likability with independence like the Queen.

Mr Spacely - George's boss and nemesis, there can only be one option; Kevin Spacey. He looks the part, and already has the name (almost)! CGI can be used to make him suitably short, rendering Danny DeVito a suitable yet ultimately boring choice.


If this film is half as good as it could be, I can die happy. If not, I'll have to keep my fingers crossed for a Moomins Movie. Oh God, a Moomins Movie? I'm palpitating again.

Coming to a Cinema Near You: When Books Go Bad

2008 brings with it two films which may not get most pulses racing, but has me palpitating in nervous excitement. Two of my all-time favourite novels, Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace are both making their way to the big screen, and I couldn't be happier. There's not much talk about how either film is shaping up at the moment, but so far I'm completely satisfied with one of the key decisions in staying faithful to a novel; casting. David Lurie and Esther Greenwood, the protagonists of Disgrace and The Bell Jar respectively, will be brought to life by the amazing John Malkovich and severely underrated Julia Stiles, and in my opinion those involved in securing these individuals deserve a pat on the back. Both are perfect for these meaty roles and I'm sure they can pull it off. Hell, they even look the part, with Stiles sporting a fairly Bell Jar look in 2003's Mona Lisa Smile (left) and John Malkovich in an on-screen shot (right).

But then again, looking at Hollywood's track record when it comes to adapting truly great novels to the screen, perhaps I should be a little more worried about my beloved books. Some of my other favourites have, after all, been absolutely and irrevocably decimated by their celluloid counterparts. Here's my list of the top 5 awful film adaptations;

1. The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Yeah, Yeah. I know that Disney is for kids, but why did they even bother? This film, which I actually loved when young enough to not understand what had been done to the plot, ends with the dashing Phoebus falling in love with gypsy Esmerelda, encouraged by the lonely yet content hunchback of the title. Victor Hugo's book, however, goes a little differently. Well, a lot differently actually. Phoebus dies. Esmerelda dies. Quasimodo? You guessed it. He actually crawls into a ditch and perishes in misery and isolation. Surely Disney would have been better off with a novel that actually ends happily?
2. Mrs Dalloway - One of the best novels written in the 20th century becomes one of the worst films I have ever had the misfortune of receiving free with the Daily Mail. The faultless Vanessa Redgrave tries her best but ultimately fails to get to grips with the eponymous party thrower, while the Septimus subplot is neither compelling nor sympathetic. I was practically willing him to jump out of the window earlier.
3. The Great Gatsby - Not the excellent 1974 version, but the TV movie from 2000. This film isn't great, but there's one thing that makes it awful; Toby Stephens is not Gatsby. He just isn't. There are no words to justify why this is the case as no one ever invented words for such a seemingly unlikely casting choice. RENT THE OLD ONE.
4. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone - The franchise may have come on in leaps and bounds, but this is still shit, failing to capture the pure magical charm of Rowling's book. Also, it's just so infuriating to see gems like Julie Walters and Maggie Smith restricted to about fifteen seconds of screen time each.
5. Enduring Love - I'm not a massive fan of Ian McEwan, but it's a good 'un nonetheless. On paper, this book enthralls at every turn, making the reader question Joe's very sanity. On film, all subtlety floats away faster than the red hot air balloon of the traumatic opening, and we are left with nothing but two supremely weak performances from the usually excellent Daniel Craig and Samantha Morton.
   

We must pray that these great books go the way of The Hours, Lord of the Rings and Pride and Prejudice, all excellent adaptations, and resist the heinousness of such attrocities to human sight.